CHAPTER1
Present Day, July 3, 2025
“But there were barely any Indian people in English history,” Heather laughs when I tell her my area of research, her whole body shaking and sending the layers of her dress bouncing with the movement.Great, even her Victorian-style costume is mocking me.
I grit my teeth and clench my fists, the familiar frustration welling up at the woman in front of me.The woman with, against all odds, a PhD in history.From a well-known school, no less.
I knew coming to the conference was going to be an exercise in frustration.I knew it, because it always is when I gather with other history professors.The constant dismissals, the light condescension, the outright confusion.But I wasn’t going to give up a chance for an all-expenses paid trip to England, where I could do more research in my concentration: Indians in England, specializing in the Victorian Period.
And however exhausting it is, I do feel like I have a responsibility to talk on as many panels as they’ll let me on so some people have to hear the history.(It was one panel, which is one more than the last conference.)
Plus, they planned this costume dinner and ball for the last night, and the opportunity to dress up like a Victorian in one of Queen Victoria’s actual houses (Osborne House on the Isle of Wight), was too good to pass up.The opportunity to see Victoria’s Durbar Room, a room designed by an Indian architect with Indian decorative motifs like scalloped arches and peacocks, and see her hallway of portraits of Indians from her time, was very compelling.
Even with this company.
Which is how I find myself in Victorian clothes outside the back of Osborne House, its formal gardens with statues surrounded by strict lines and curves of grass and plants behind me and the Italian Renaissance-style palazzo in front of me, its tall belvedere tower just in the edge of my view.
I wish I was in the tower right now.Or anywhere that didn’t involve talking to Heather.
“And they were all servants and sailors, if they even had jobs.They couldn’t be happy, wealthy, or influential.How much could there possibly be to research?”she continues before I have a chance to respond.
Not that I know what I’m going to say.From past experience, any argument I use, no matter how backed by primary and secondary sources, won’t fit in with her perception of what history is.So she’ll ignore it.And I’ll get even more frustrated than I am now.
Before I can make the decision, Heather makes it for me.
“Oh, is that Professor Andrews?I’ll catch up with you later.”She leaves me without hearing any of my meticulously researched points on why she’s wrong.
“Actually, turns out, ships need crews and sailing is one of the most dangerous professions with a lot of sailors dying on trade trips, so a large number of Indian lascars were employed for the return voyages then dumped in England with no way back so they had to find a way restart their lives there.And once Indians were traveling for trade, they started travelling for other reasons too.Not just sailors, but scholars, doctors, spouses of British citizens, aggrieved princes and domestic workers, among others.As the English moved on to straight-up colonizing, more and more Indians came to England.So.There were Indians of all socio-economic strata in England from 1600 CE on,” I say to the spot where Heather was.The empty spot.
“Meera, there you are.Are you talking to yourself?”My friend and fellow historian Luis hands me a glass of wine that I accept with alacrity.
“Just trying to educate Heather on some salient facts about Indians in England since the seventeenth century that she doesn’t want to hear.”She’s already across the room, talking to the professor she mentioned, conversation with me probably long forgotten.Not by me, but definitely by her.
Luis nudges me with his shoulder.We’ve known each other for years, bonding over our slightly overlapping specialty areas: Brazil in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries for him, and Indians in England during the same period for me.
Okay, so we have entirely different specialties, but we gravitated to each other because we were some of the few professors of color studying the history of people of color at the conferences we’ve been to.
“The conference is almost over.You won’t see much of her after that,” Luis says.
I take a sip of the drink; it’s much more comforting than Luis’s words.“No.But there will be so many more people like her wherever I go.”
From L.A.to London and every other city, most people do not care about my area of study.It’s a conversation I’ve had to have a lot since I started college, with professional historians and amateurs alike.They’ve never heard of Maharajah Duleep Singh or the Munshi, which is fine; people can’t know everything.The problem is they have no interest in finding out, and even outright deny, that the routes of colonization were a two-way street.
A two-way ocean.
“I mean, there have been ships since the Phoenicians made them back in 1300 BCE.Humanity has been sailing long distances for quite some time now.”
Luis holds his hands up.“I know.”
“And since boats are going from England to India, the chances are very high that boats will also need to go back from India to England.You know, to transfer the spices, tea and racism back home.”
“Yes, you’re preaching to the choir here.”
I sigh.“I know.”
It’s frustrating to be in the minority, pun very much intended, studying a topic no one has any interest in.I thought that by me studying and publishing on the subject, I would be able to make people outside of academia, if not care about it, at least acknowledge that people of color existed in the Regency, and all the periods that followed, and some that came before.
“Do you want to come back in?”Luis points to the mansion with his cane, really getting into the costume part of this party.
